The snow fell from great, dark clouds invading as usual over the low peaks of the Appalachians from the south west, leaving a blanket of white silence over the forest and the Valley floor. Isolation was nearly complete, which suited the old man.
He celebrated the occasion by selecting an especially fine and rare Cuban Hoyo de Monterey double corona from his humidor and appreciatively caressed its tip with a long match. He stood at a window watching Sadie the Lab cavort in the snow outside. Satisfied that the tobacco was burning evenly, he decided a fresh pot of coffee would be a good idea and by the time the pot was brewing, Sadie had decided she wanted back into the warmth of the cabin. She stood quietly as the old man toweled off the snow and wiped her feet then shot into the kitchen and sat, tail thumping the floor, bright eyes fixed on the canister where the doggie treats were stored.
Night had fallen when the dog tensed, alerted by something only she heard. She pricked her ears and cocked her head before emitting a low, prolonged growl. The old man, who had closed his eyes long ago with his head resting against the back of the couch, soaking in the warmth of the fire that crackled in the stone hearth, put a hand on the Lab’s head to calm her. An animal, perhaps a deer, had passed close to the house. The dog shook him off and leapt from the sofa to stand by the door where the growl turned into a frantic bark.
Annoyed, the old man rose and went to the door where Sadie continued her disturbance unabated.
Before he could decide whether to pull on some boots and a coat to go out and inspect, there was a weak knock at the door, really more like a scratch, accompanied by a voice. He couldn’t make out the words. He flung open the door and a dark-haired young woman, clad much too lightly for the weather, stumbled against him and would have collapsed had he not caught her beneath her arms.
Sadie’s barks now turned to solicitous whines, and she followed as her master half carried the visitor to the sofa in front of the fire. She was mumbling something unintelligible through lips turned blue and stiff with the cold. She wore only a nondescript dress with a man’s light jacket over it. Her dark hair was wet with snow. On her feet was a pair of sturdy leather shoes several sizes too large for her.
He placed her on the sofa and went to the bedroom to gather a heavy, quilted comforter in which to wrap her and a towel to dry her hair.
His mind was racing. How had she gotten here without setting off one of his perimeter alarms? The answer had to be that the sensors were covered with snow where she had passed them, and he mentally kicked himself for relaxing the entire day when he should have been out checking his security system.
What worried him was that she could have come from only one place — the old turkey farm downslope. He wasn’t sure what this might portend, but he did not think her arrival was a good sign.
He covered the woman’s shivering form with the comforter and did his best to dry her hair while she stared at him with large, dark eyes. She was little more than a girl, not at all unattractive and was of no distinctive ethnicity. Any ambiguity in this regard, however, was immediately cleared up when she managed to pronounce her first intelligible words: “Pomogi mnie.” Help me, in Russian. That left no doubt where she came from.
Switching to Russian, the old man asked, “Are you lost?”
She raised her eyes to him incredulously. This was a country of miracles where this cadaverous, bearded old man even spoke Russian!
She shrugged the comforter from around her shoulders and grasped the front of his checked flannel shirt. “We must leave now!” A hard light entered her eyes as she said this, but it was followed by a spasm of sobs. “They’ll come after me.”
This definitely ruined his day. The snow had stopped falling before noon, and the sky was clearing. The girl’s tracks through the snow would be easy to follow even in moonlight.
“Slow down,” he said, pushing her gently back onto the couch. “Who will come after you? Your friends? Are you lost?” He repeated the question because if she answered yes, things would become much less complicated.
“They are not my friends. They want to kill me.”
The damned Wahabis! What the hell were they doing in Virginia?
He may not emerge as the winner in a long stand-off, besieged in his cabin. They had to get away before that happened.
Options available were limited because of the snow. He doubted he could drive out through it, and that meant that even if he called for help, no one could get up the treacherous mountain roads. But maybe the sturdy Land Rover could make it.
The old man glared through the snow-obscured windshield at the unbroken expanse of white ahead. Even the sure-footed Land Rover was slipping as he drove at a snail’s pace down the slope towards the gate at the main road. The deeply rutted trail from the cabin was invisible beneath at least two feet of snow, but he knew the way well.
Before they reached the gate, however, the snow resumed with reinvigorated fury, the wind driving the white stuff horizontally.
They weren’t going anywhere.
The old man swore under his breath.
Carefully, he backed the Land Rover up the slope to the cabin. Curse words he hadn’t uttered in years shouldered their way to the front of his brain.
The girl was alarmed. “We must leave this place.”
“There’s no way we’re getting out of here for a long while. That’s the bad news. The good news is that your friends will have a very hard time getting to us. That means no one will be able to take anyone anywhere until this storm is over.”
She stared as if he were some alien creature, this lanky old man with long hair and a patchy white beard covering his cheeks and chin, slitted eyes, and gnarled hands. A man who spoke Russian like a native. A man with a past.
“You won’t hand me over to them.” It was both a statement and a question
Back at the cabin the generator had cranked to life indicating the power lines were down. The noise of the motor would signal their location. He stepped out of the Land Rover to close the garage doors against the gusting wind, and the dog leapt out after him and darted outside. Between the cabin and the garage she sank into snow already so deep that her head was barely inches above the surface. Apparently considering this to be an insult to her character and race, she barked sharply and plowed ahead toward the cabin door, undoubtedly wishing her master would decide whether he was coming or going.
They followed the dog inside. The fire still glowed. A few moments and some additional logs later, it was blazing again, and the girl stared into the flames.
She was startled when the old man shoved a glass of whiskey toward her and settled onto the sofa beside her.
“Drink this. It’ll help,” he rasped.
A tentative sniff told her the glass contained alcohol, strong alcohol, and she hesitated, eliciting a snort from the old man.
“You need something to warm you up and calm you down. Then you can tell me what the hell is going on. First, you can tell me your name.”
She stared at him as though he had asked an incredibly difficult question and had to think hard about the answer.
After several seconds she said, “Olga. My name is Olga Polyanskaya.”
Chapter 47
How much time? It was unlikely that trouble would not follow quickly on the girl’s heels.
The problem was that he didn’t know how much time he had before one or both of the men from the turkey farm would be knocking at his door, led there by the woman’s tracks. They would have to come soon if they were to follow the tracks through the fast accumulating snow. If they were Chechens they were familiar with mountain terrain.